


It could be easy

by The Sign of Tea (NoPlastic)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Aromantic Character, Aromantic Mary, Canon Compliant, Multi, Other, Platonic Relationships, Polyamory, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 09:15:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7309108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoPlastic/pseuds/The%20Sign%20of%20Tea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After leaving her past behind, Mary wishes she could find love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It could be easy

As an assassin, she was called “the machine”. They said she had a heart made of ice. Everything she did was cold and precise, and she never fell for a man (or anyone, for that matter). She wasn’t the kind of woman who could confuse and seduce with sweet words and flirting. Her job was to kill without emotion, and especially without remorse.

She did well. But after a while, feelings caught up with her, no matter how fast she tried to run from them.

Fear came first, which was to be expected in an occupation with so many potentially traumatizing situations. Not too often, but often enough, it rendered her useless. She couldn’t aim properly if her hands were shaking.  
Regrets came soon after, when her thoughts kept going in circles at night and nightmares kept her awake.  
Wishes followed last – the wish to quit, to be in a better, brighter place, to be a different person. The wish to be loved.

No matter what people said about her, she’d always wanted to fall in love, to have a crush on someone. Not even a handsome prince, or whatever it was the other girls dreamed of, just… someone. Anyone. It never happened.

One night, she was sent to kill an entire family. Not for any good reason, just because someone with power wanted revenge. As she walked down the street, hiding her face behind a cap and a scarf, she realized she couldn’t do it. There was no way she could bring herself to murder innocent people. On a bridge, she stopped, threw her gun into the river and fled and never came back.

 

Years later, most of her wishes had come true. She was a different person. Her new name was Mary, she lived in London and worked as a nurse. Instead of killing, she helped and cared for people. Sometimes she even saved lives.

The doctor’s name was John Watson. He immediately told her to just call him John. He was a good doctor, friendly, only at times a bit rude. Underneath, he had the physical and emotional scars of a history in the military. That, and sadness.

Mary read everything about the Reichenbach incident that she could get her hands on. There’d been a man who called himself a consulting detective, a tall and impressive bloke, who’d apparently killed himself. The circumstances of his death were suspicious. John had witnessed his death, and the grief was still visible in everything the doctor did, from the way he walked to his voice when he spoke. Some days were better, some were so bad that Mary constantly had to save him from making mistakes, like mixing up patients or symptoms and prescribing the wrong medicine. It practically became her second job.

It took a while before he became aware of how much she did for him. He thanked her, smiling like a schoolboy, and asked her out to dinner.

It was perfect. For a short while, she allowed herself to hope for love again. In stories, evil people were often saved and redeemed by the love of an ordinary person, and perhaps this was her time to fall in love, to be saved.  
But she didn’t fall in love, but John wasn’t ordinary.  
One night, when they were lying side by side, and her fear of losing him wouldn’t let her sleep, she told him. She explained that the love he’d started to develop for her was different from the love she had for him. His was based on feelings of romance, hers on friendship. He tried his best to understand, and said he didn’t mind. Even when it became obvious how awkward she was on their dates, when she made rude jokes at inappropriate times, he just found it endearing. He learned quickly that he had to initiate kisses and gestures like hand holding most of the time, because she would frequently forget that these were things people did. John accepted her the way she was.  
She knew he wanted to marry her before he asked her.

When he did ask, the situation was ruined – but not by Mary this time. A tall man with dark curls waltzed in and claimed he was the supposedly dead detective, returned to London. Judging by John’s reaction, it was true.

After observing them and their interactions for not even ten minutes, Mary already knew she could love them both, and wanted them to be friends again so they could become something like a family.

The strange man – Sherlock – was focused completely on John at first, as if there was nobody else in the room. With a few clever words and witty remarks, Mary managed to get a bit of his attention. John would tell her later that it was extraordinary how friendly Sherlock reacted to her. There was a reason for that, of course – reasons John knew nothing about. Sherlock was just another person who was used to lying and pretending to be somebody else; he was almost as good at it as Mary. They understood each other right away, on a deep, subconscious level.

 

Long before John started to accept Sherlock as a part of his life again, Mary and Sherlock became friends. They texted each other and talked on the phone, they stayed in contact even in stressful times, and he became the most active supporter of her and John’s wedding plans.  
She got to know all the other people who were involved with Sherlock, too. Never in her life had she had so many friends. In her mind, all of them had special places – John as her partner, Sherlock as a chosen family member, Molly and Greg as more casual friends. She tried to explain all that to Mrs. Hudson once, who didn’t really understand, but said it was fine.

From Sherlock, of all people, Mary learned that she was probably pregnant.  
Before she could bring a new life into the world, she knew she had to take another. Charles Augustus Magnussen, the old blackmailing egomaniac, had survived every attempt of Mary’s former employers to kill him. After she’d tried to leave her past behind, the information Magnussen had was enough to ruin everything for her and, more importantly, her child.  
As soon as her pregnancy was confirmed by a doctor, she made the decision to kill CAM. She’d made friends with his PA already (no actual friendship – just a scam), in case she would need it, and now she did. It would be easy.

 

She stood in Magnussen’s office and was about to shoot him, when it all went wrong in the worst possible way.  
Sherlock was suddenly in the room, and he told her that John was downstairs. The only way to keep him from telling John about what he’d witnessed was to kill Sherlock, as well as Magnussen, and run away.  
Her hands started to shake. She couldn’t do it. She could live with many lies, but not with the horrible secret of having shot Sherlock.  
Whatever she did now would inevitably ruin her life. Briefly, she considered killing herself, but that wasn’t an option because of the baby.  
In the end, she wounded both Sherlock and Magnussen badly enough that they would stay unconscious for a while and needed medical care, but they would surely survive. For Sherlock, she even took the time to call an ambulance before her escape.

 

All the bad feelings from the past came back, especially the regret. New nightmares in which she accidentally killed Sherlock, or he died in the hospital because of happenings she had no control over, had her waking up drenched in cold sweat every night.

John’s side of the bed was empty, because he’d moved back into his old room in 221b, and he refused to talk to her. As far as she knew, he didn’t even talk to Sherlock very much anymore.

One night, when she was wide awake at 4 am and crying silently in the dark, her phone buzzed on the nightstand. There was a text from Sherlock, saying that he couldn’t sleep either. Mary texted back, asking how he’d managed to deduce that she was awake, but he only answered that “his sources” said too much negative stress was bad for the unborn baby. Seconds later, he sent another text, asking Mary for help with a particularly difficult case. She was about to refuse because of her pregnancy, but it turned out she didn’t have to leave the house, didn’t even have to get out of bed. Sherlock sent her everything through text messages, and Mary solved all the mysteries for him. Partly just by thinking, partly with information from internet sources only people like her had access to.

After that night, Sherlock started to send her mysteries to solve almost every day. She wasn’t sure if he really needed her help anymore – perhaps he was just making them up now – but it helped. It gave her hope again, and made her feel appreciated.  
After a while, she started to send some of her own riddles back, spy secrets she’d been wondering about and wanted him to deduce the answer to. She knew how much he liked challenges and praise. He solved nearly all of them.

A month later, he started to go on doctor’s appointments with her. He pretended to do it only to keep John and an extremely curious Mrs. Hudson updated on the baby, but Mary was pretty sure Sherlock also enjoyed spending time with her.  
When Sherlock had finally recovered from his gunshot wound enough to be able to leave London again, he invited Mary over to his parents’ house for Christmas.

She received the best Christmas present she could have wished for – John’s forgiveness and his reassurance that he didn’t even care about her past anymore. But the joy lasted only for a short while before it all went to hell.

 

Now they’re on a tarmac, and Mary has tears in her eyes as she embraces Sherlock. They are like two drowning people holding on to each other for dear life, about to be separated.

She doesn’t know how John feels about Sherlock, doesn’t know how he feels about her, or how anyone feels about anyone. Sherlock’s coat is rough against her cheek, and she digs her fingers into the fabric as he kisses her goodbye.

She knows he’s high, although he’s hiding it well enough even in front of Mycroft, and she won’t give this little secret away.  
In some way, Mary does feel like the villain of the story who was saved by love now, even if love didn’t come in the usual form, but as friendship instead. If the difference mattered once, now it doesn’t. She loves John and John loves her, Sherlock loves her and she loves Sherlock. She wants to keep holding him, like she owes him, until he comes down, through all the consequences. But she won’t, she can’t be there for him, and he’s already gone.

The plane takes off and she watches it disappear, holding her husband’s hand and hoping that this won’t be the end of the world.


End file.
